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I am not sure I would say one is better than the other, but they are very different. As you said, in Rust you are forced to handle errors by the compiler. In Elixir, you actually don't. In fact, we even encourage you to [write assertive code](http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2014/09/writing-assertive-c...). This is also commonly referred as "let it crash". In a nutshell, if there is an unexpected scenario in your code, you let it crash and let that part of the system restart itself. This works because we write code in tiny isolated processes, in a way that, if one of those processes crash, they won't affect other parts of the system. This means you are encouraged to crash and let supervisors restart the failed processes back. I have written more about this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840401 I also think looking at Erlang's history can be really interesting and educational. The Erlang VM was designed to build concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. When designing the system, the only certainty is that there would be failures (hello network!) so instead trying to catch all failures upfront, they decided to focus on a system that can self-heal. I personally think that Erlang and Elixir could benefit from static types. However, this is much easier said than done. The systems built with those languages tend to be very dynamic, by even providing things such as hot code swapping, and only somewhat recently we have started to really explore the concepts required to type processes. But a more humble type system could start with the functional parts of the language, especially because I think that other techniques of model checking can be more interesting than type systems for the process part. |